


The Dynamics of Separation

by RicePaper_Fox



Series: The Art of Alliances [3]
Category: Weiß Kreuz
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Jealousy, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Reunions, Sociopathic Romance, post-Kapitel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-17
Updated: 2014-04-17
Packaged: 2018-01-19 18:29:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1479661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RicePaper_Fox/pseuds/RicePaper_Fox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"His current partner is a poor substitute for what he really wants. He dreams of wild red hair and laughing blue eyes. He's tempted to go out and try to find Schuldig. But he made a deal over three years ago. They wouldn't actively try to find one another."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dynamics of Separation

**Author's Note:**

> And yet, the stuff I write in one night invariably ends up being better...
> 
> Disclaimer: I don't know Weiss Kreuz. Any original names which correspond to actual people are completely coincidental, considering I was using a random name generator. The two French quotes are from a children's rhyme.

The water in the shower is scorching, pounding on their skin. Mouths caress, part, move across each others bodies and for the first time in years, Crawford is scared. He knows what he has to do, and the thought of losing what he has scares him.

It's their last night.

“We have to part ways,” he says against his partner's shoulder. “They won't expect it.”

He feels Schuldig's breath against his chest, coming out in hot, hard pants.

“For how long?”

“I don't know.”

It's true. He's tried looking, and the farther he went the more he lost track of time. The whole point is the unpredictability. To have no real plan is the best, and perhaps only way, to beat a Precognitive. He's not very good at it, but Schuldig is the best. There are still remnants of Esset looking for them, and they need to gain an upper hand.

He feels fingers digging into his shoulder blades, traveling down, all the way down to the base of his spine, and he knows he'll have scratches. He relishes it.

“They'll figure it out, eventually,” Schuldig says. “At first they might hold back, waiting for the other one of us to appear, but then they'll figure it out.”

“They'll watch us. For as long as it takes, they'll watch, expecting us to contact one another.”

He turns his head to bury into that glorious hair. Now he can feel Schuldig shaking, too, perhaps from anticipation.

“But we'll meet again.” Schuldig says, and Crawford can hear the question. Schuldig is begging for confirmation.

“Yes,” he says.

“When?”

“When your hair is red again.”

~ ~ ~

Her name is Angela.

He's falsified his way into a position as a financial director in New York City, one of any number in the company. He has his own office with big windows and an assistant named Angela. She likes his chest under his business shirt, he heard her tell a coworker so. She glances up at him from her desk and smiles coyly at him. He smiles back.

She's got hair that's a particular shade of red.

Nathan Jacobs arrives on time every morning, lost in the bustle of white collar workers of New York, and sits at his desk. Angela brings him his coffee—black—and a copy of the _New York Times_ , which she leans over his shoulder to give him. Her hair swings down with it, and it makes his breath catch. She smiles.

“So what about those bank robberies?” she asks. “Same guys, they say. Moving west.”

“Thank you, Angela,” he says with finality.

Still, she smiles over her shoulder on the way out.

Six months in, he's summoned into his boss' office. He's good at his job, almost too much so. It's making the higher-ups suspicious. They want to know how he's managing to forecast the financial climate so well. They were wary about a man who read that liberal rag more religiously than the Wall Street Journal. He doesn't have any sources to give. He doesn't know anyone, after all.

They give him a raise.

~ ~ ~

Five men, one hotel room. It smells like sweat.

Three of them are childhood friends, one a buddy from college. The last one they met only a few months prior to their expedition.

They're outside Vegas, now. The sun beats down, and the air conditioning in this hotel—if it can be called that—barely works. The newest member of their team lays on the bed, sweating and swearing. He's never experienced heat like this his entire life. The others laugh when he smears SPF 85 on his skin every morning, but Hell if he's going to burn out of pride; his skin is far fairer than they realize.

Lucien Marois' accent, though, makes them nervous. It's good to instill a certain level of fear into others.

Right now, though, they're digging through their duffels, looking at the latest take. The plan is to make it to L.A., taking every bank along the way. It was under the foreigner's insistence that they go for smaller establishments with less security. There's no need to get too greedy. They've already made every newspaper from New York to their coveted Los Angeles.

The sun goes down, and the guys go to a local bar and get shitfaced. All except one.

Once they're passed out, he takes out his pistol—the one he used in the robberies—and attaches the silencer none of them ever knew about. He shoots each one in the head and heart.

He takes a single duffel with him. Time to move on.

~ ~ ~

The whole office is watching the television when he walks into work one morning. Four of the bank robbers have been found dead in their hotel room this morning, and the fifth one is missing.

For the first time, someone has gotten a clear look at his face. The hotel clerk provided information for the sketch, and everyone is surprised that no one has been able to describe him before. After all, he's striking, with narrow cheekbones, arched eyebrows, clear blue eyes. Underneath the facade of Nathan Jacobs, Brad Crawford's heart pounds; his hair may be shorter, dyed platinum blond, but it's definitely Schuldig. And it's clear to Crawford that Schuldig intentionally allowed himself to be seen, so that Crawford could know.

Schuldig knew that not knowing was what would kill his partner.

He sits at his desk and thinks about Schuldig moving his way across the country—the same country he's in, no less—taking what he can, giving nothing back. He works with deadly efficiency. He thinks about Schuldig shooting the men he'd been traveling with, and he's hard.

Nathan Jacobs gets nothing done that day.

On the way home, he sees Angela walking down the street. He crosses and asks if she'd like to have a drink with him. She looks like she can't believe her luck, and agrees. He takes her to a place he's never been to before, and it's not even midnight before she invites him back to her place.

Crawford tries to enjoy himself, but she's too soft, too gentile. All he feels when he's inside her is frustration. And when he's got her over the back of the couch, he notices her roots.

They're black.

The next morning, Nathan Jacobs arrives to two detectives, and is shocked to learn that his pretty assistant has been raped and killed. Of course he knew that she was attracted to him, but he always tries his best to be professional. All of his coworkers verify this.

Of course, Nathan Jacobs is soft of heart. He can't stand the thought of someone around him being so abused. He quits less than a month later.

~ ~ ~

Bank robberies in America wouldn't normally make French newspapers. Lucien Marois, though, was a French artist from a rural town in Provence, independently wealthy, famously promiscuous. And he had been killed in his home nearly ten years earlier.

Not that Frans only reads French newspapers. There were so many other interesting things to read in foreign papers.

Like the girl in New York. At first, he didn't know for sure, although she had her hair dyed a certain flaming red. But someone had leaked to the press about the lipstick on the mirror.

_Chante, rossingol chante, toi qui as le coeur gai._

So Crawford remembered who Lucien Marois was.

It had taken a long time to find, and he suspected that the only reason it made news at all was the message left behind. He wondered if Crawford had moved from New York since. Whereas Schuldig fell off Esset's radars by changing completely, he suspected Crawford had simply faded into the corporate backdrop of Wall Street. It was more his style.

And Schuldig was Frans Ziegler now, dark-haired and mysterious, living on the edge of the Rhine. After some work, he's perfected his rolling Bavarian dialect. He's a stage actor. A mediocre one at that. But it's fun, really.

He wonders whether he should have stayed in America, except that would have defeated the point. They couldn't be too predictable, and what was more so than staying close to where Crawford was. They had the entire world to hide in.

~ ~ ~

He's recently become David Curtis.

For a while, he was Jim, selling used cars to high school students at rates they couldn't afford. Thankfully, one of Esset's teams had put him out of his misery, and all he left behind was a convenience store robbery—five dead bodies, all of whom were oddly unidentified, and a university student in critical care. No money in the drawer and no suspects.

Now, he lives a life of complete boredom.

The neighborhood is unbearably WASP-y. Rich, quiet, and safe. He goes to church on Sundays. He's got a girlfriend, April, and everyone is disgustingly proud of his political correctness in dating a black girl. Still, he refuses to fuck up the way he did when he was Nathan. No more redheads for him.

He takes the train into the city five days a week. He's been to barbeques with his vicious, honey-sweet neighbors and has proposed to April.

There's a new team watching him, and he can sense that they're getting bored. He wishes that Schuldig would send him some sort of message—anything—so that he doesn't get lost in this bizarre new life of his.

It's been nearly two years since he last saw his lover.

~ ~ ~

On a whim, he'd opened the _Times_ website. He read the whole damn thing.

Now he's pacing angrily. The wedding announcement, complete with photo, is glaring at him, and he thinks he's going to fucking kill someone.

“You think you're so fucking funny!” he screams at the computer.

“Frans?”

René pokes his head in the door, looking worried. His director. There's always a role for the director's lover. Frans smiles sweetly.

“Come here,” he says.

René closes the door and approaches.

Schuldig pulls out his gun.

~ ~ ~

“Honey, were you expecting a package?” April walks into the room, holding up a thick manila envelope. “There's no return address.”

David frowns and holds out his hand. He studies it curiously, then carefully breaks the seal and peers inside. April shifts impatiently. Sometimes it seems as if he's hiding some deep, dark secret from her.

“Well?” she asks.

There's a script in it, written in French. It's one of Moliere's satires, _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme._ A single photograph falls out of it. A crime scene in black and white, with a handsome man slumped against a dressing room mirror which has messy, angry writing on it.

_Tu as le coeur á rire, moi je l'ai á pleurer._

On the photograph itself, in bold, red marker,  _Quid pro quo, Meine Liebe_ .

April is in a panic, but Crawford feels calmer, happier than he has in a long time. He basks in his lover's jealousy.

“I'm calling the police,” she finally says. 

“Wait,” he says, sharply.

“Dave, this is serious,” she snaps. “We need to report it.”

“No,” he says. He picks up the letter opener from the desk. “We don't.”

“And why is that?”

“ _Quid pro quo_.”

~ ~ ~

Three years and ten days. He's started counting, now.

He's moved to his native Berlin and taken on the name Andreas Heidelmann. The harsh Berlinerisch, now increasingly less common within the city, comes back easily, naturally. His hair has grown out somewhat, and he's moved to a more nondescript brown.

Andreas is not quite a drifter, but he doesn't hold any job for too long. His employers don't much like him, and he hates them. They think he's impatient, overly self-satisfied, grungy in his dress and speech. And he's prone to fits of violence. Out of all these traits, only two of them are really true.

He's not meant for this type of work. His heart sings for blood, and the occasional Esset assassin isn't cutting it anymore.

His entire being misses something else. A calm, quiet mind near his, strong hands, a large, solid body against his own. To be completely covered, surrounded, possessed by his American.

~ ~ ~

In the two years he'd lived in America, Crawford's description had gotten around a little too much for his own comfort. And having a social security number in one's country of residence could be both an advantage and an enormous disadvantage.

So he moves to England. At first, his American ways stick out—his accent, his dress, his manner. It takes a little while to readjust to the British passive-aggression and understated demeanor. His patterns of speech take less work to correct.

He's a professor in the University of London, now, specializing in turn of the century artifacts and early twentieth century history. His class on the Third Reich is popular, with lessons on propaganda and Nazi mysticism. Although, sometimes the university questions the validity of his claims and the existence of his sources.

Many suspect he's a Yank, and he's neither confirmed nor denied these claims.

Everyone already knows he lives with a man, though. He's done with women, really. His current partner is a poor substitute for what he really wants. He dreams of wild red hair and laughing blue eyes. 

Esset seems to have given up on him, since he only strikes out at them when threatened. They've lost more agents than really necessary. He's tempted to go out and try to find Schuldig. But he made a deal over three years ago. They wouldn't actively try to find one another.

Besides, the future is becoming clearer as he waits, and he knows better than to mess with a good outcome.

~ ~ ~

Schuldig's done with working for others. He'd much rather simply become a vagrant. After all, he can survive under any circumstances.

He has no home. Only what he carries on his back. He has a little money left over, which he spends wisely. He's decided to simply fall off the grid, and fewer people do that better than the homeless. Occasionally he moves from city to city, and people on buses wrinkle their noses as his old clothes and filthy hair. Eventually he cuts the brown out, and leaves it a choppy, red mess.

Schuldig hasn't gotten wind of Crawford since the girl in the suburbs was found killed with a letter opener over four years ago.

All this time, he's held faith in Crawford's conviction that they'd end up together again. But he knows a thing or two about precognition, and how unclear it gets when  _years_ are involved.

He thinks eventually he'll hire himself out as an assassin again. He still has some street cred, after all. With Crawford gone, he'll be going it alone.

~ ~ ~

Crawford walks to work with a couple friends, if they could be called that. More like acquaintances. He's never met anyone new within the last ten years that he couldn't kill without so much as a blink.

He gets a  _feeling_ and stops. His colleagues take another moment or two to realize that he's no longer with him, then turn and call for him. But he's not paying attention. There's another psychic here.

His eyes scan the surrounding buildings. Finally, they land on a pile of ratty clothes on the sidewalk. It isn't unheard of to come across an untrained Talent, and he starts to turn away. Then he stops.

There's a flash of red.

“Go ahead,” he calls. “I'll catch up.”

They exchange an unsure glance, and continue on to the university.

Slowly, quietly, he approaches the pile of rags, then crouches. He can barely breathe. Gently, he shifts the coat slightly. The hair is dirty and limp, but most assuredly red. He brushes his fingers across it longingly.

The man on the ground wakes suddenly and almost explosively, and Crawford's on the ground with a gun to his head. Angry blue eyes turn amazed, and the gun goes limp.

“Hey,” Crawford says, smiling.

“Son of a bitch,” Schuldig replies.

And then Crawford has him lifted up, pressed against a wall. It's like they're trying to devour each other, and Crawford doesn't care who sees, or that Schuldig smells faintly of garbage. Five years of aching need, unfulfilled longing.

“You know I haven't bathed in about two months, right?” Schuldig breathes against his mouth.

“Fuck it,” Crawford says.

But he takes Schuldig back to his apartment and promptly pushes him into the shower. And then he follows him in. They're feeding each others giddiness, and the sex is hot and hard. Afterward, on the bed, it's slower, languid, but no less intense. He doesn't ever want to stop touching Schuldig again.

“So what now?” Schuldig asks, laying on his side, pressing his hand to Crawford's chest.

“Your turn,” Crawford said. “Whatever you want.”

He doesn't think he could deny the redhead anything right now, so he won't even bother.

“How about Italy?” Schuldig says, smiling lazily. “The Amalfi Coast. Or Rome. I could use a vacation.”

“A vacation from what?” Crawford laughs. “Not working?”

“Mm.” Schuldig hums softly, and then they're kissing again. It's completely addicting.

It's mid-afternoon before they make a move to get up. Crawford's cell phone rang most the morning, and he eventually threw it across the room, and it's still there, a broken mess. But if they're going to make a fast, clean break, they have to do it soon. 

So Schuldig digs in the closet, sneering at another man's clothes. He finally settles on taking a pair of jeans that are slightly short on him, a t-shirt that is wonderfully tight, and a leather jacket that was always too big for its owner but perfectly fitting for him.

Crawford has a bolt-bag already, which he yanks from the top shelf.

On the way out the door, Crawford thinks that the Amalfi Coast sounds just about perfect for a pair of absconding lovers. Laughing, he throws an arm around Schuldig's shoulder, and breathes in the smell of that glorious hair.


End file.
